VENUE Gaiety Theatre, Dublin		ENTRIES 18
HOST Bernadette Ni Gallchoir		DEBUTS Malta

1971 saw some huge changes. After the brief pre-song previews of artists debuted the year before, the EBU now asked each country to produce a whole preview video of their song that was generally broadcast in each competing country in special preview shows in the weeks preceding the contest.  The BBC usually transmitted the previews in shows on the two Sunday afternoons preceding the event, a tradition that ran until 1994.  In those pre-internet days the first inkling of the list of competing nations and running order came through the humble pages of the Radio Times!.  The very first preview video was Marianne Mendt kicking things off for Austria, wearing a fur coat and smoking a cigarette. PC hadn't got very far in 1971.

Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, a tiny auditorium staged the event (the 2001 contest was staged in a soccer stadium!), it was so petite that the hostess was deposited on the balcony as there was no room on the stage, and had a wonderfully bizarre backdrop resembling three enormous unfurled condoms.  The tiny principality of Monaco claimed it's only victory (with a French singer performing a French song),  while Germany's Katja Ebstein claimed a second successive third place (after a second spot in 1980 she holds the unique honour of attaining a top three position under three different voting systems).

There were also major changes in the voting this year as the EBU reacted to the fallout of the 1969 four way tie, yet their solution was as surreal as the theatre design.  Their solution, for the next three years, was to invite two jury members from each country to the host city (there were vague rules about age),  plonk them behind a bank of desks, and give them a set of paddles from one to five to indicate their marks for each song.  They "voted" on camera but their votes were already signed and sealed before the cameras went over to them.  It all made for some classic Eurovision madness.  Men with kipper ties and women with enormous bouffants,  no possibility of "Nul Points",  and a strange correlation between the votes awarded by the two jurors from each nation given their brief exposure to a hundred million viewers or more.  The Luxembourg jurors both awarded one point out of five to almost every other song while many other countries lavished much more.  Amazingly this voting method ran for two more years.        

WINNER: Monaco

UN BANC UN ARBRE UNE RUE by Severine

voting

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